Existing installations

With efi instead of bios (and gpt partitioning?), this can be as simple as just installing Windows to a second partition, and using efi to choose bootloader. This was done on a Dell Latitude E6520. —This unsigned comment is by Stoffi (talk) 03:45, 28 August 2011‎. Please sign your posts with ~~~~!

fs-driver only works with inode size 128

If you want to use fs-driver(Ext2 IFS) in windows to access ext2/3 filesystems, the inode size must be 128. this should probably be mentioned in article... ran into this problem myself. fs-driver will not mount my ext3 filesystem because it has inode size 256. —This unsigned comment is by Dan39 (talk) 22:01, 19 December 2009‎. Please sign your posts with ~~~~!

Mounting partitions and dual-boot

And lastly, the surprisingly tricky bit about "mounting" partitions that do not belong to you on a dual boot system. Ultimately for me what ended up working was knowing which file systems the others could read (esp in a UEFI system). These things can't just be "linked" to because even the pages linked to don't have the information. I got quite a bit of help from friends and google. Victoroux (talk) 14:01, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Use Cases

Alad, i think you might be off base on that one, that entire GOAL of that excercise was nothing to do with laptop, but to Demystify arch dual boot. Can we PLEASE put this back, its my new GOTO for dual boot on any windows arch system, no matter the case, whenst i dont want to deal with UEFI and or GPT due to windows or hardware limitations. --Wolfdogg (talk) 23:11, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Ahh, after further thkning on this, i probably misled the whole thing by the use case title having anything to with Laptops and HP, its not just a Use Case, its an ENTIRE revamp of the Dual Boot instructions, can we somehow incorporate it on the Dual Boot instructions page, labeling it how you will, so that those instructions are clear for any user to run through as a MBR-BIOS use case if necessary? The idea is it being some new official simple dual boot (as close to all encompassing for newbs) as can be, to where they can work off it how they choose, but as a simple foolproof starting point, pointing out places where its up to the user to make the choices necessary to apply it to their user? I need a good writer for that. --Wolfdogg (talk) 23:16, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

The whole instructions for setting up dual boot can be summarized as:

make sure there are at least 2 partitions (described in Partitioning),

make sure that Arch is installed on one partition (described in Installation guide) and the other OS on the other partition (cannot be described on the ArchWiki),

There is no point in duplicating the instructions for all 3 steps on a single page. Also, your instructions consider only one possible scenario, they won't apply for example if the other OS is already installed.

Is there anything to add or can this be closed? -- Alad (talk) 09:23, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

MBR-BIOS

Special notes

This method uses parted exclusively for all partitioning

I'ts assumed (if your bios permits) that you have it set to IDE or SATA/RAID, and not on AHCI mode

In this scenario, the user additionally saved 1GB free space at the beginning of drive for later use (Later conversion to boot bios, GPT partition table, grub installations, anything really)

FYI this was for HP laptop i3 generation Intel HP4520s#aba xt988ut

Begin

Get yourself a readied drive. You might want to check it out with smartmon tools first, once you trust it and its ready for wipeage then follow the exact procedure below (with as little deviation as possible except for partition sizes).

Note if your newer to parted, pay close attention to the B,MB,GB figures, those are intended to aid in aligning your partitions correctly. This setup may vary on yours, but its highly recommended to keep trying until they are aligned properly first.

Using parted, create the following partitions, adjusting start points where you see fit. If you don't want the free space, adjust the first start point to 1MB or something (success is not guaranteed on any partition adjustments, for this scenario)

Install grub onto your disk sdx, replacing sdx with the disk you are working with(be careful).

# grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

run os-prober to find your windows install

# pacman -S os-prober
# os-prober

You can also edit your default boot order here in /etc/default/grub by changing the order from 0 to 1,2, etc..

now compile a new grub boot config to finish things up..

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Now reboot, Success!

Alternative grub install

Instead of overriding windows boot partition with grub as we just did above, you can alternatively use the windows boot partition to point to grub, ONLY if you install GRUB to the partition, and not the drive boot record. i.e. dev/sdx1 instead of /dev/sdx

continue with bcedit in windows to point a second boot to the grubbed partition.. good luck with that..

-- 02:12, 4 September 2015‎ Wolfdogg

Windows 7 not supporting UEFI boot from MBR?

Quoting from your article:

Windows Vista (SP1 and above, not RTM) and Windows 7 x86_64 versions support booting in x86_64 UEFI mode from GPT disk only, OR in BIOS mode from MBR/msdos disk only. They do not support IA32 (x86 32-bit) UEFI boot from GPT/MBR disk, x86_64 UEFI boot from MBR/msdos disk, or BIOS boot from GPT disk.

You're sure about this guys?

I had Windows 10 / Linux Mint dual boot previously. It was a GPT partition table. I did a factory reset from Windows 7 backup DVDs, but forgot to disable UEFI boot. All partitions were erased, Windows 7 installed and was working just right. Now I tried to install Linux Mint again. And, during this process, I realized that (a) the partition table is set to MBR (really!) and (b) UEFI boot is still enabled! (which was why Mint installer failed to detected Windows 7).

I cancelled Mint installation, rebooted my laptop, disabled UEFI boot, and launched Windows. It seems to be working, although it... had to install some drivers again. Namely for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

Dedicated partition not needed to boot grub2 using bcdedit

Since Dual_boot_with_Windows#Using_Windows_boot_loader involves creating linux.bin and putting it onto C: , there's no need to create a FAT32 partition or even install grub (either to MBR or a partition boot sector). When installed to MBR, the role of that 512 byte block is to load core.img embedded to the MBR gap. When installed to partition boot sector, its role is to load the file core.img residing in /boot/. The thing is: Windows Boot Manager loads the whole file, even if it's larger than 512 bytes. This allows to embed core.img into that file and put it to C:. Good news grub ships with a special boot sector that does not try to load core.img, but assumes that it's already loaded - lnxboot.img. Here's what you do:

suggestion to split this page for MBR and GPT type boot

As the complete boot environment on Windows for UEFI/GPT vs BIOS/MBR type boot varies quite a bit it is difficult to extract the right information from this page. Wouldn't it be better to split this page clearly in a UEFI vs BIOS type boot? Also GRUB2 is more likely to mess with an existing installation then systemd-boot. Should split there too, IMHO.
Theking2 (talk) 18:23, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

There's separate sections like Dual_boot_with_Windows#BIOS_systems. If you have a different structure in mind, I'd suggest to make a copy on your user page and propose it here. -- Alad (talk) 09:16, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

Restoring a Windows boot record

Windows UEFI vs BIOS limitations

This part would benefit from a simple table pointing out what is possible in Microsoft 's universe. Also, should we still consider XP and Vista? They have died some time ago. Theking2 (talk) 18:29, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Re old Windows versions, Vista is supported until 2017, but it wouldn't the first time we've deleted Windows XP information from the wiki. However, articles referring to outdated versions of proprietary software aren't uncommon, e.g. compare the Mathematica article. Since it's only one or two sentences, we might as well leave it in. -- Alad (talk) 09:21, 2 September 2016 (UTC)

This wiki focuses on Arch and not Windows, hence the current single page is more than sufficient. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 09:36, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Shrinking the Windows Partition

The wiki mentions

"All systems pre-installed with Windows XP, Vista or 7 32-bit, irrespective of Service Pack level, bitness, edition (SKU) or presence of UEFI support in firmware, boot in BIOS/MBR mode by default."

So preinstalled systems are taken into account. But in all pre-installed systems, Windows usually occupies the full partition.

This wiki page contains information on how to reduce the size of the partition from Windows when using safe boot. I believe that some information from this section would be very helpful in this page. I'm not adding it because of my lack of experience with this, but perhaps someone else would like to adapt and add.